Thomson

It’s a heck of a way to run a pre-election campaign. On the eve of an expected election, politicians usually spend their time playing up good news, downplaying the bad, shaking hands and kissing babies.

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In 2009, John Vaillant and his family moved from Vancouver to the state of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. The acclaimed non-fiction author wasn’t actively looking for material: the year-long trip was his wife’s idea (she’s an anthropologist), and at the time Vaillant was eye-deep in the edits for his book The Tiger, which would go on to win British Columbia’s $40,000 National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

Shayne Woodsmith is the mild-mannered antithesis of a slacker. Not only is he the creator of the local photoblog Faces of Edmonton, Woodsmith is the poster child for literary industry. The thoughtful, lanky 34-year-old has self-published two novels since 2012, most recently My Brother Mercy, which launched just before Christmas.

What better way to enjoy the holiday season than curled up with a good book by a fireplace? If you’re looking for suggestions (for yourself, or for gifts), look through our annual compilation of favourites, courtesy of Edmonton Journal writers.

I read comics as a kid, sure. My brothers and I had piles of them at the family cabin in northern Saskatchewan. Nothing ultra-nerd or highbrow. Calvin and Hobbes, Mad magazine, Tintin, The Far Side. Mostly, it was Archie comics, their papery covers curled from beach-reading, sand caked into the seams, the pages torn and sticky from half-dissolved jawbreaker inspections, or maybe leech guts.

Colm Tóibín talks about the people in his stories as though he’s known them, and they one another, all their lives. “There’s a game going on,” the acclaimed Irish author said recently by telephone from Los Angeles, where he’d stopped for a visit between literary engagements, including the opening night of Edmonton’s Festival of Ideas on Thursday.

Zarqa Nawaz passes out at the sight of blood. It’s not a trait that bodes well for a doctor. But the pipette incident that left her woozy on the floor during medical school didn’t faze her. Nawaz was going to be an OB/GYN.

Given how long it takes to write and publish a book, there’s often a bit of ceremony involved once authors finally receive their finished copies in the mail. So it went for Ted Bishop, whose previous work, 2005’s Riding with Rilke, won the City of Edmonton Book Award and was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award.

Bruce Cockburn has always had a way with words. Over his five-decade, 31-album career, he’s demonstrated his prowess as a songwriter, giving us memorable lyrics about love, landscape and socio-political injustice.

The drooling face of Ebola, a chamber pot tipping, a snot explosion and a kitty pooping — it was just a dream job for illustrator Josh Holinaty. For the past year, the Edmonton artist and musician has been charmingly personifying flus, bacteria, foot fungus, malaria and even a “mould baby” for Vancouver microbiologist Jennifer Gardy’s terrific new book, It’s Catching: The Infectious World of Germs and Microbes.